Helping the handicapped onto Crane Beach in Ipswich

Saturday

Aug 16, 2014 at 7:54 PMAug 18, 2014 at 3:59 PM

By Dan Mac AlpineIpswich@wickedlocal.com

Any summer day the human cornucopia spills out and overflows onto Crane. Every skin color fills the beach. Languages from Spanish, to Russian, German, French, Chinese, Japanese and even English fill the air.But one element of the human experience remains primarily absent — the handicapped.The soft sand stands in the way of those in wheelchairs or on crutches and create insurmountable barriers to a day of sun, fun and surf.Alexandra Pecci, of Plaistow, N.H., remembers dragging her then 4-year-old daughter, Chloe, on a bed sheet across the soft sand to a beach last year because she'd grown too big for Pecci to carry to the beach.Chloe, now 5, has spina bifida — her spine failed to form properly — which affects her lower gross motor skills and she must use a rolling walker."Smooth surfaces are fine," said Pecci. "When it comes to something like sand, the walker doesn't work. Now she's getting older and heavier, I didn't think I could carry her much longer."Crane Beach and a donation from twin teens have begun to bring down the barriers that keep the handicapped from enjoying what for many is a rite of summer.Crane has begun a policy of taxiing beachgoers from its handicapped parking spaces to the beach and back again via a golf-type cart and Benjamin and Samantha Kateman recently donated a special wheelchair for their b'nai mitzvah — service — project that the Jewish faith requires before a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah.The twins, 13, raised roughly $2,500 for a mobi chair, a kind of all-terrain wheelchair that goes over soft sand and even floats safely in the water like a giant life preserver."The Trustees are committed to making universal access a priority at our properties and enhancing the visitor experience for all," said Barbara Erickson, Trustees of Reservations president and CEO, which owns Crane Beach among other properties throughout Massachusetts.That commitment is important to Pecci and her daughter."I come from a long line of beach people," said Pecci. Her parents rented a beach shack every year on Plum Island. Her aunt and uncle rented a cottage on Salisbury Beach. Pecci hit the beach once or twice a week with Chloe when she was smaller, but Pecci was wondering how much longer that could continue. At 45 pounds, just getting Chloe to the beach seemed a Herculean task."She could sit and dig for hours. Her lips would turn blue. Her whole body gets submerged. She's really, really in the water. If I couldn't go to the beach in the summer a little part of me would die for sure," said Pecci.The beach holds Benjamin and Samantha and the Kateman family in a similar way."It was hard for them to understand the beach wasn't accessible for everyone," Millie Kateman said of her children. "Once they realized that — they had little bit of an idea of it because their grandmother had a broken hip and they saw their grandmother couldn't go to beach for a while — they wanted to do something about it."Benjamin and Samantha worked with Sudbury-based SMILE Mass (Small Miracles in Life Exist), a nonprofit dedicated to helping families living with children or adults with disabilities. They volunteered in the SMILE office and they worked through the agency to buy the mobi chair.For Kateman the project was important not only for the beach accessibility it affords the handicapped, but also for an important lesson it showed her children."You can make a difference," Kateman said. "This didn't take five years. It took a couple of months because they put out a nice letter and made phone calls. It doesn't mean you have to devote your whole life to make a difference. If everyone could give just little bit, what difference that would make. Everyone can make someone else's life better."